Eroticism is born together with cinema. The Kiss – just a year after the Lumière brothers’ screenings – and After the Ball, with the first on-screen undressing of a woman down to her corset, turn the kiss and the female body at once into shock and attraction.

In the 1920s and 30s Europe boldly explores forbidden desire, including homosexual relationships. The avant-garde comes from Germany, which had lived through defeat in the First World War: Different from the Others, Girls in Uniform, Ecstasy (Austria). But in 1934 the United States introduces the Hays Code – a strict system of censorship, especially in matters of sexuality. Eroticism retreats into metaphor, hint and subtext: Crime Without Passion, Spellbound. In Europe there are fewer formal bans, but the war slows everything down.

The 1960s are a turning point: the contraceptive pill, weakening censorship, the sexual revolution. In the 1970s eroticism becomes part of mass culture: on cinema billboards erotic posters sit alongside pornographic ones, boundaries blur, everything is permitted. The symbol of the era is Emmanuelle. But the spread of AIDS in the 1980s destroys the atmosphere of carefree freedom, and in the 1990s eroticism turns anxious: lovers no longer come together but struggle against each other. Desire becomes power, manipulation, danger (Basic Instinct, Damage).

Today the situation is paradoxical. Intimate scenes are filmed more cautiously, intimacy coordinators appear, and the emphasis shifts from provocation to psychology – in series such as Sense8, intimacy is shown as a language of empathy and mutual connection. The genre returns in a new form – as romanticised sensuality and slow seduction. And one more shift is noticeable: the camera looks more and more often at the male body.

Films mentioned in the lecture:
The Kiss (1896)
After the Ball (1897)
Different from the Others (1919)
Girls in Uniform (1931)
Ecstasy (1933)
Crime Without Passion (1934)
Spellbound (1945)
And God Created Woman (1956)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Emmanuelle (1974)
The Key (1983)
Basic Instinct (1992)
Sense8 (2015, Netflix)